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There is an Ockham's Razor hypothesis: often, in the academic world, what matters is passing the orals, and getting the advanced degree by whatever means. All the code has to actually do is exhibit some functionality: the effort goes into the thesis, and getting the thesis committee members to sign off on it.

Most likely, the author knew the likelihood of any reviewer actually examining his code was low. That may account for his "teasing" remark you cite.

I can speak from personal experience on this: I was awarded a Master's degree from UC Berkeley after returning from a year-long 1975~76 fellowship for study in India with a 200+ page thesis with 200+ footnotes. None of my committee actually read it ! I remember with delight my meeting with the key person on signing off that the thesis was kosher in terms of methodology: he picked up the thesis, appeared to be weighing it, and said: "well, as long as I don't have to read this ..."

I was kinda disturbed by this: both happy I was getting the degree six-months early, and, disappointed no one read the tome I literally sweated blood to write

Of course, as Bob sang: "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali

Hi Forogar, I am kind of long-winded My project was a collection of academic research, field notes, interviews, case studies, etc. Humanities/sociology/psychology. No code, for me, in that incarnation.

«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali

Hmm. While the tone of the comment isn't helpful, the content is useful. A long time ago in a job far, far away... I implemented an algorithm from a master's thesis in a piece of code. I documented the source pretty thoroughly - thesis title, author name, institution, dates, institution identification numbers, and so on. After having been the victim of plagiarism(*), I despise people who fail to attribute sources.

(*) The quarter I took a class called Real-Time Programming (I got A's) my final project listing was missing from the cabinet where instructors returned projects. A couple quarters later I got called into the department chairman's office. Someone had taken the RTP class and turned in a program 99% identical to mine. The instructor remembered my code because I was the only person in class who used assembler macros. At first they asked if I had given or sold the code to someone. I told them that my listing had gone missing when I took the course, which the instructor remembered. The last I heard, the person who did all of this was expelled from the university for the quarter and on probation for the remainder of his time.

Probably in 1980 (or +- 4 years) had a user complain because the computer would not accept Feb 29 as a valid date. We had been using the software involved for about 3 years at that point. When we looked at the source code we found this comment.
"Thirty days hath September.
All the rest I can't remember.
Except February which never works right anyway."

There was no code to handle leap years! The quick fix was to change days in February to 29 so we could run the advertisement in the Newspaper on that date and have time to implement a correct routine.

after many otherwise intelligent sounding suggestions that achieved nothing the nice folks at Technet said the only solution was to low level format my hard disk then reinstall my signature. Sadly, this still didn't fix the issue!